European Ice Hockey Model Analysis

The season for European Ice Hockey has finished, and what a great first season of betting at Sportpunter it has been. Head to head betting made 10% ROI, line betting 9% and totals 9% ROI since we started giving predictions in December. Whilst there hasn’t been a plethora of bets in each category (h2h: 208, line: 450, totals: 318), the consistent profits still stand for themselves.

But despite the low number of bets, it has definitely been a very profitable period, and there’s no excuse not to do an analysis of it, as it might come up with some interesting results; which as we shall see below, it does.

Firstly h2h betting:

Shown below is our tables of how we went, broken up into betting Home/Away, minimum overlay amount and betting per league.

Clearly we are betting on more home teams than away teams which is generally a good thing. But more pleasing is the fact that as the overlay increases, so does the percent return, which considering that the sample size is quite low, is good to see. It’s hard to break up which leagues are doing better than others because of the low sample size, but I’ve put that in there as well.

With more bets on line betting, the results seem even more consistent. Three quarters of the bets are once again on the home team, but both seem to be equally profitable. When the line is negative, positive or zero, we seem to profit equally around the 9% mark, which is indeed very pleasing. Profits were not made when the overlay was greater than 20%, however with only 49 bets ni this category, it is not something that I would look too much into.

Finally, and most interestingly, the totals. Clearly here, there is maximum value on the unders betting. A massive 19% ROI has been made betting unders from 155 bets. Betting overs actually lost a small amount of money. Even large overlays on the overs still lost, whilst unders gained profit in every overlay category. Clearly the unders odds are biased in our favour. Whilst the sample size is small for both unders and overs betting, history has shown on this website, that unders betting has and probably will be always more advantageous to bet than overs; no matter what the sport.

But almost all of this profit was gained in Switzerland’s National A league. This is very interesting. Whilst the average across of the leagues totals scores was 5.33. Switzerland’s was only slightly lower at 5.27. The average totals line across all leagues was actually 5.27 as well, but in Switzerland’s case it was 5.44. And there is what lies the advantage.

Whilst it could be random variation that the Swiss provided the majority of the profit from its 57 bets, it must be noted that even not taking into consideration of this league, 5% ROI was still made betting the unders in the other leagues.

I wouldn’t put all your eggs into the Swiss basket at this stage, we simply dont have enough data to determine if the edge in this league is bigger than the rest. But at least, keep it in the back of your mind for the end of seasons analysis next year.

Full betting history and European Ice hockey information is given here. Predictions are free.